Promise and Pitfalls of Extending Google's PageRank Algorithm to Citation Networks

Abstract

We review our recent work on applying the Google PageRank algorithm to find scientific "gems" among all Physical Review publications, and its extension to CiteRank, to find currently popular research directions. These metrics provide a meaningful extension to traditionally-used importance measures, such as the number of citations and journal impact factor. We also point out some pitfalls of over-relying on quantitative metrics to evaluate scientific quality.

3 pages, 1 figure, invited comment for the Journal of Neuroscience. The arxiv version is microscopically different from the published version

References in corpus (7)

• An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output
• Finding Scientific Gems with Google
• Journal Status
• Ranking Scientific Publications Using a Simple Model of Network Traffic
• Citation Statistics
• Scale-free network growth by ranking
• How to make the top ten: Approximating PageRank from in-degree

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Ranking in evolving complex networks
• Methods for measuring the citations and productivity of scientists across time and discipline
• Quantifying the influence of scientists and their publications: Distinguish prestige from popularity
• Identification of milestone papers through time-balanced network centrality
• Ranking nodes in growing networks: When PageRank fails
• Modelling Citation Networks
• Quantifying and suppressing ranking bias in a large citation network
• Rich-club and page-club coefficients for directed graphs
• Recent advances in bibliometric indexes and the PaperRank problem
• The Demise of Single-Authored Publications in Computer Science: A Citation Network Analysis
• Recognition of Emerging Technology Trends. Class-selective study of citations in the U.S. Patent Citation Network
• Popular and/or Prestigious? Measures of Scholarly Esteem
• Applying weighted PageRank to author citation networks
• Discovering author impact: A PageRank perspective
• $C^3$-index: A PageRank based multi-faceted metric for authors' performance measurement
• Publication Induced Research Analysis (PIRA) - Experiments on Real Data